I wrote a lot of pieces in 2020! As we close out the year, I want to share a short list of my favorites. (thread)
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This is why I'm not a critic of "cancel culture." It's crucial to impose social costs for the breech of key social norms. The lesson of overreaction is that we need to recalibrate judgment to get it right next time, not that we need a lot more bad judgment in the other direction.
Obviously, people will disagree about which norms are important, about how bad it is to violate them, and thus about how severe the social cost ought to be. That's just pluralism, man, and it's good.
It's important to openly talk through these substantive differences, which is why derailing these conversations with hand-waving moral panic about "cancel culture" is obnoxious and illiberal.
Screaming "cancel culture!" when somebody pays a social costs other people have been fighting hard to get others to see as necessary is often just a way to declare, with no argument, that the sanction in question was not only unnecessary but in breach of a more important norm.
It's impossible to uphold social norms without social sanctions, so obviously anti-cancelers are going to want to impose a social cost on people they see as imposing unjustly steep social costs on others.
Every single critic of "cancel culture" just thinks the wrong people are getting canceled. pic.twitter.com/DDIVccj8zV
— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) February 2, 2021
Obviously, people will disagree about which norms are important, about how bad it is to violate them, and thus about how severe the social cost ought to be. That's just pluralism, man, and it's good.
It's important to openly talk through these substantive differences, which is why derailing these conversations with hand-waving moral panic about "cancel culture" is obnoxious and illiberal.
Screaming "cancel culture!" when somebody pays a social costs other people have been fighting hard to get others to see as necessary is often just a way to declare, with no argument, that the sanction in question was not only unnecessary but in breach of a more important norm.
It's impossible to uphold social norms without social sanctions, so obviously anti-cancelers are going to want to impose a social cost on people they see as imposing unjustly steep social costs on others.
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Keep dwelling on this:
Further Examination of the Motif near PRRA Reveals Close Structural Similarity to the SEB Superantigen as well as Sequence Similarities to Neurotoxins and a Viral SAg.
The insertion PRRA together with 7 sequentially preceding residues & succeeding R685 (conserved in β-CoVs) form a motif, Y674QTQTNSPRRAR685, homologous to those of neurotoxins from Ophiophagus (cobra) and Bungarus genera, as well as neurotoxin-like regions from three RABV strains
(20) (Fig. 2D). We further noticed that the same segment bears close similarity to the HIV-1 glycoprotein gp120 SAg motif F164 to V174.
https://t.co/EwwJOSa8RK
In (B), the segment S680PPRAR685 including the PRRA insert and highly conserved cleavage site *R685* is shown in van der Waals representation (black labels) and nearby CDR residues of the TCRVβ domain are labeled in blue/white
https://t.co/BsY8BAIzDa
Sequence Identity %
https://t.co/BsY8BAIzDa
Y674 - QTQTNSPRRA - R685
Similar to neurotoxins from Ophiophagus (cobra) & Bungarus genera & neurotoxin-like regions from three RABV strains
T678 - NSPRRA- R685
Superantigenic core, consistently aligned against bacterial or viral SAgs
Further Examination of the Motif near PRRA Reveals Close Structural Similarity to the SEB Superantigen as well as Sequence Similarities to Neurotoxins and a Viral SAg.
The insertion PRRA together with 7 sequentially preceding residues & succeeding R685 (conserved in β-CoVs) form a motif, Y674QTQTNSPRRAR685, homologous to those of neurotoxins from Ophiophagus (cobra) and Bungarus genera, as well as neurotoxin-like regions from three RABV strains
(20) (Fig. 2D). We further noticed that the same segment bears close similarity to the HIV-1 glycoprotein gp120 SAg motif F164 to V174.
https://t.co/EwwJOSa8RK
In (B), the segment S680PPRAR685 including the PRRA insert and highly conserved cleavage site *R685* is shown in van der Waals representation (black labels) and nearby CDR residues of the TCRVβ domain are labeled in blue/white
https://t.co/BsY8BAIzDa
Sequence Identity %
https://t.co/BsY8BAIzDa
Y674 - QTQTNSPRRA - R685
Similar to neurotoxins from Ophiophagus (cobra) & Bungarus genera & neurotoxin-like regions from three RABV strains
T678 - NSPRRA- R685
Superantigenic core, consistently aligned against bacterial or viral SAgs